[orca-list] improving dbr daisy book reader

[kendell clark <coffeekingms gmail com>]

hi all
I've been after a few people to write a daisy player for linux, but no one seems in any great hurry to do it, 
so I'm 
planning to write one myself. There's an old sourcefforge project, http://dbr.sourceforge.net, which does 
some of the 
work for me. There are a couple of problems and a few questions I have. I'm writing this for the entire linux 
community 
I have no interest in porting it for windows. The code for most of the application is written in python, 
which I can 
learn. The problem is, the bulk of the code is written in spanish, which I don't speak, lol. Is there any 
program I can 
run the files through to get at least a pseudo translation in english so I can start hacking on it? If not, 
is there 
anyone who would be willing to help me? The only other daisy reader I have any experience with is fs reader 
for windows, 
so I'm not sure of the features most blind people would expect. Me, personally I'd like the application to 
open with the 
last book I had open, preferably where I left off, if possible. I'd also like to be able to press a keyboard 
shortcut to 
open a list box of all the books I have stored on the computer. There's a menu item in the gui for this but 
it doesn't 
work yet. There are also controlls for previous and next chapter, paragraph, page, etc which heavily depend 
on the 
markup that the book has. I've tested a couple of daisy books and it seems to work ok, but if the markup is 
wrong it'll 
loop. What features would you guys find useful? it has bookmarks, play controlls, and a menu of total 
duration, etc. It 
does not support text only books yet, I'm going to need to add this myself. Daisy 3.0, the newest version of 
the 
standard, is not supported at all, so I'll need to add this as well. Unless there's a major change in legal 
policy, I 
probably won't be supporting rfb&d and/or nls dtb books, due to their restrictive licenses. The app is fully 
accessible, 
as far as it goes. Any help would be extremely welcome, including from teh original devs of the project. IT's 
a long 
process that would probably take me quite a while to complete. I also have a copy of the daisy 3 standard if 
anyone 
needs it. Any discussion of features etc should probably be done on the orca list, but any offers of help, or 
private 
messages should go to me personally, so we don't flood the list with off topic posts.
 I'll also be hanging out on the orca chat room on gnome.org, as well as talking arch if anyone wants to drop 
in 
there.
I primarily use arch linux, but if this ever gets off the ground I plan to support other distros, vinux, 
fedora, etc.
Thanks
 Kendell clark